


Anyone's Ghost

by dunkelgrau



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-09 06:30:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dunkelgrau/pseuds/dunkelgrau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever wondered what does Tony Stark feel towards one certain agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?<br/>No. Not love, for God's sake.<br/>This is the story of agents, shadows, ghosts... and hope. Just because it feels like that exactly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anyone's Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still not sure about the "Major character death".  
> Let's say, I hope for the better in spite of anything.
> 
> I'd also love to thank lovely [Alchemical Alice](http://alchemicalalice.tumblr.com/) for her enormous and very fast help in fixing the translation; as usual, I've written the original text in Russian and it took me a while to translate it.
> 
> And - yeah.  
> The title of the story is the title of The National's song.  
> I'm absolutely in love with it, both the [original](http://youtu.be/eTW_CdOeAFg) and the [cover](http://youtu.be/ek4WVJSk2W4) versions.  
> In fact, this fragment of lyrics just got me to write the whole story:  
>  **I had a hole in the middle  
>  where the lightning went through it -  
> told my friends not to worry...**  
> It was the trigger that pushed me to writing.  
> I do hope you like the result.

When Tony Stark meets agent Coulson for the first time, he hardly notices him.

Of course, Tony is a bit distracted by the post-traumatic stress, his dirty martini, and a dazzling view of Pepper Potts in an open-backed dress directly in Tony’s line of sight. Agent Coulson has nothing but a blank look and a suit that isn’t even fitted properly to his size. He is easy to overlook. He is just a bureaucratic ghost, merely one of the shadows of the law-and-order machinery, nothing more.

A couple of days later, when he and his "boys" (as the amazing Pepper without a second thought calls a platoon of military men, clearly trained as some sort of special forces) dig Stark out from the ruins of the exploded building, Tony finally has to pay attention to the agent. The way the suit jacket is fitted doesn’t look that disgusting anymore — for some reason this is the first thing that catches Tony's eyes. In response to that, the quiet agent calmly looks at Stark, clearly reading his mind, because the next thing he says is, “It happens, Mr. Stark. Let’s admit that some things are impossible to wash off”.

‘Some things’. Tony snorts at the chosen definition. He is almost about to ask to specify the _some things_ part, when he finally notices that the agent is favouring his right arm and moving somewhat more stiffly than a normal person would move. 

“They seriously pulled you out from some impossible mission just to talk to me?” Stark grins, hissing at the touch of someone from the medical staff who is treating the scratches on Tony’s face at the moment.

“I wouldn't call it ‘pulled out’, exactly”, Coulson concludes, after a pause.

They've got him _exiled_ for a while, Stark realizes. A nice, medically approved vacation, they said; something like that, surely. They washed the man of blood; mended and dressed him in something clean; and sent him to speak to a playboy. Well, well. If Coulson’s bosses hoped that the agent would improve his health while wasting time communicating with Stark, they surely miscalculated.

“Careful, Mr. Stark." Coulson sounds as if he knows everything Tony is thinking about right now. “We still need to handle a press conference without too many lies."

And even though his tone is dead serious, Tony is unable to dismiss the impression that Coulson is mocking him. In is own, incomprehensible-to-mere-mortals way.

 

And so it goes on. Tony never feels sure about anything to do with Agent Coulson. He's not sure if he really even infuriates the agent that much. He is not sure whether the agent is serious when he politely promises to taze him. He is not sure if Coulson really does understand what he's doing when he is helping Tony to fix his home-made particle accelerator. In fact, he is not even sure he wants to know what the heck it is that brings his usual super-nanny to New Mexico.

“Take care, Mr. Stark," Coulson says, calm and collected, shaking Tony’s hand goodbye. “We need you."

“More than you think,” Tony snorts.

“Not that much," Coulson admits, without the slightest change of tone or expression, before coming out of the studio; and Tony has that feeling again, the feeling of being beaten with his own weapon of choice. Coulson is clearly capable of killing people with his irony in cold blood.

Tony is not quite sure how to feel about this.

 

In fact, that certainty never comes. It is almost fun to know that Phil "Agent" Coulson possesses tolerable hacking skills, enough for breaking through the access codes of any door in Stark’s mansion. Tony considers it a kind of game. Coulson manages to get along with Pepper, Jarvis, and even that dumb bot, Dummy. The latter somehow, without any software upgrades, at some point starts making coffee for the agent on a regular basis in proportions which Stark never had for himself.

Stark never makes requests for more information on the agent, but somehow he knows the details that a close friend of Coulson might have known. He knows that Pepper often chats with the agent over the phone, and not just about business matters. He knows that the agent visits various chamber music concerts, and writes to someone in Ireland from time to time. He is well informed about the fact that the agent occasionally sleeps in the passenger’s seat while someone else is driving a company car from one base to another. One day Tony discovers a unique collection of music, hidden in Jarvis’ database: classical, jazz, country, and a peculiar bunch of synth tracks, apparently chosen in accordance with someone's particular and very specific taste. Stark himself prefers good old rock, but at some point he simply asks Jarvis to “rock the dancefloor with something from DJ Agent”.

Jarvis keeps silent for a moment. For a human, the pause would have been caused by embarrassment; for the artificial intelligence, it’s merely a delay in processing the request that wasn’t inscribed in the program. Then Jarvis, indeed, rocks the dancefloor.

Fifteen minutes later, at some long track without words, but with a piano and several batches of rather avant-garde sounding cello, Stark finally realizes that he has been sitting and staring into space for quite a while already. It’s a nice working soundtrack, he thinks.

And he does feel a bit awkward when he watches Coulson’s facial expression shifting slightly, as the agent walks into Stark’s workshop somewhere in the second third of the playlist.

Stark, for a tiny second, feels like he’s just been caught peeping.

“You really like that?” Coulson asks quietly, doubt in his voice, not bothering himself with greeting.

The music, pouring from the speakers, is full of strange echoes of synthetically warped female vocal, intricately mixed with muffled drumbeat and distorted howls of electronics strings. This is the music you can swim in, drifting, allowing it to blissfully take away all the unneeded thoughts. Tony blinks, looking from his own drawings to Coulson.

“I’m not sure yet," Stark says truthfully.

He doesn’t specify _what exactly_ he is not sure about.

 

He has the feeling that he’s tripped and is unable to wake up when he hears Nick Fury over the intercom, saying a phrase that doesn't make any sense to him, doesn't compute.

“Agent Coulson is dead."

The deck of the Helicarrier is full of dead and injured, but only one corpse makes Stark freeze in place: the one that Tony isn’t actually allowed to see. Fury assigns the secrecy protocol, and it feels like it’s way easier for Tony to commit ritual suicide than to break through: looks like S.H.I.E.L.D. IT service sometimes really works damn well, after all. Tony tries to talk to the doctors to get an official confirmation, spies on IT managers and security officers, gets into a fight — but all he gets is the permission to stay at a crime scene for a while. All he gets is a cold space of prison deck, half-ruined by a single shot of some infernal weapon prototype, with silent bloodstain still remaining on one of the walls.

He still can not believe it. Because there are certain things that are just… unnatural.

"Agent Coulson is dead" is clearly the most unnatural thing Tony Stark has ever heard.

 

Later, after having exposed all the possible archives and broken all the database access codes he could reach, Stark is sitting on a bed in one of the apartments in the part of New York that managed to survive the invasion. Tony has already searched the rooms and now he still feels a bit taken aback by the fact that there are almost no personal possessions in there. Three nearly identical suits in the closet, six or seven different shirts, half a dozen ties; one shirt, with traces of something unpleasantly blue, is in a basket for dirty clothes. A password-protected laptop, the data on which threatened to self-destruct at the slightest sneeze, left on a window-sill. A device, which has nothing earthly in its design, collated cog by cog, in the middle of the table, next to a newspaper and a cup with traces of coffee. All this doesn’t count as ‘personal’, really.

And above all that there’s a subtle, but already noticeable layer of dust.

Tony walks around the apartment quietly, as if afraid to wake somebody up. He finds the bar — thank God, not password-protected, though Tony almost expected otherwise. Tony silently observes the laconic sight of two bottles of wine, a flask of rum, a set of six glasses and, dammit, a pack of cigarettes. Almost full one. _Almost._ The idea of agent Coulson, smoking, has never occurred to Stark.

However, until recently, he hasn’t been aware neither of the cellist, nor of the Captain America fan crush, nor of the fact that some agents were able to shoot gods with untested prototypes. On last thought Tony smiles weakly. It turns out that they have more in common than he used to think.

They _had_ more in common.

He is not sure of what he should do. He takes one of the jackets off the hangers; it still bears the traces of some unexpectedly sweet scent, a weird mixture of smells of spice, coffee, and cologne. He finds a cigarette lighter, in the nightstand, next to an old notebook, filled with strange numerical codes. Tony will rather be damned than manage to find the key to the cipher. Tony will rather be thrice damned than give up trying to pick it up, sooner or later.

He sits on the bed, wrapping himself in the jacket. Satin lining feels cold in contrast to his body temperature. Tony smokes, gently flicking the ash into a saucer, noting that Coulson smokes damn strong cigarettes, as a person who smokes very seldom but with full immersion in the process.

Tony waits.

He doesn't know _what_ he's waiting for, exactly. But he is quite certain that if he tries to think about his reasons and analyze his hopes, his arc reactor will surely burn out at once, shatter into pieces, crack to the core.  
After all, Tony Stark, according to the public opinion, has no heart; he has an appropriate substitute to break.  
He just-  
He just keeps waiting.


End file.
